Pong

Pong was designed by Al Alcorn and released by Atari in 1972. Although
a lot of people mistakenly believe it was the first arcade game (this
designation actually goes to Computer Space released the previous year),
it is undoubtedly the first truly successful arcade game and lead the
start of the video arcade and ultimately the video game industry. Pong
is interesting from a technical perspective because like most of the
early arcade game it did not use a microprocessor but was implemented
entirely in discrete logic.

Technical Information

I have recently complete a very detailed description of how the Pong
circuit works on my Blog over at Atari
Age.

Schematics

The original Atari schematics that are found on the net are of pretty
poor quality and are very hard to read. When I went to do my circuit description
blog, the first thing I did was re-draw the schematics. You can get them
here:

Simualtion

DiscreteSIM 1.0

To run DiscreteSIM you will need the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 installed.
You can get this from Microsoft's web site.

What is DiscreteSIM?

Discrete SIM was designed as a proof of concept for a method of simulating
the operation of discrete logic arcade games. Since these machines did
not have a CPU and ROM code it's hard to simulate these machines using
traditional emulation. Pure functional simulation of these games is also
error prone especially since most people do not have access to the original
hardware to compare against.

The approach taken by DiscreteSIM is to simulate the game circuit at
the component level using a generic digital logic simulator. This allows
the node list of the original circuit derived from the schematics to be
input into the program and then simulated to see the video output and
game mechanics.

Unfortunately the component level simulation is takes a lot of processing
power so even on a very fast PC it probably will not produce a playable
frame rate. On an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ system it takes about 8 seconds
to render each frame.